The Black Artists Leaving America (Published 2021)

The broken oasis is a motif in the post-emancipation South. Wilmington is but one example. Others include Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Rosewood, Florida. And Little Hayti, not the one in Miami but the long-lost Black town near Durham, named after the first Black republic and birthplace to Vogue’s André Leon Talley. And Zora Neale Hurston’s Eatonville, Flor

In this long battle, a battle by no means finished, the unforeseeable effects of which will be felt by many future generations, the white man’s motive was the protection of his identity; the black man was motivated by the need to establish an identity. And despite the terrorization which the Negro in America endured and endures sporadically until t

It is worth mentioning for the purposes of this book that most of the Black revolutionaries from the 1960s who fled to Cuba were from the Deep South. William Lee Brent, from Louisiana; Eldridge Cleaver, originally from Arkansas; Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, from Chattanooga; Huey P. Newton, originally from Monroe, Louisiana; Robert F. Williams, from Monr

The Black Belt is a crescent-shaped stretch of land from Virginia through to Louisiana and Arkansas, where the head turns into a sickle. Or like the hammerhead of a shark. Because slavery was concentrated in the Black Belt—it was good land for growing cotton—the name acquired a double meaning. It grew to refer to the counties of the South with majo

Black people have often expressed a desire to be American and have been encouraged in this by America’s undeniable history of antiracist progress, away from chattel slavery and Jim Crow.

Nevertheless, all of this happened, and is happening. Out of this incredible brutality, we get the myth of the happy darky and Gone With the Wind. And the North Americans appear to believe these legends, which they have created and which absolutely nothing in reality corroborates, until today. And when these legends are attacked, as is happening no

The generations of freedom fighters in the Black Belt continue their work. And in Mississippi, they have made it the state with the most extensive Black political representation in America. It is the closest we have to a realization of full Black political citizenship. And it is the only state with a scion of Black nationalism as the executive of i

closest to the queen’s but to her adviser’s, who’d been broken down into a chair so that a queen, heir to everything she’d ever seen, could sit. I took a survey of Europe post-1800. I saw black people, rendered through “white” eyes, unlike any I’d seen before—the black people looked regal and human. I remember the soft face of Alessandro de’ Medici